Quoting: Wessel

Quoting: Purple Library GuyI wonder if there will be any differences in environment--wetter vs drier areas, warmer/colder, more rugged topography, destructive weather--that might favour different creature designs, so you can see evolution to adapt to local conditions.

This is almost exactly what the second scenario currently in the game is about :) .

Quoting: Purple Library GuyAlso the first thing I thought looking at the fruit was "That apple won't fall far from the tree. These plants need seed-spreading gimmicks."

Actually already in the simulation, but at the moment you cannot utilize the full potential because the areas you work with are so small. Optimizing the simulation so you can have larger areas is my top prio at the moment, though.

Cool! Galapagos, here we come.

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Looks interesting.
I wonder if there will be any differences in environment--wetter vs drier areas, warmer/colder, more rugged topography, destructive weather--that might favour different creature designs, so you can see evolution to adapt to local conditions.

Also the first thing I thought looking at the fruit was "That apple won't fall far from the tree. These plants need seed-spreading gimmicks."

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Quoting: BeamboomYour suggested strategy holds a lot of truth in it, and yes defining the targets and breaking down the target audience and tailor the campaign would surely be how to go about.

But. It's not that easy.

To all you who form the optimistic side of this discussion

I don't recall saying I was optimistic. I just don't think the main barriers are at this point intrinsic to the Linux OS or even the Linux open source software ecosystem. If anything, I feel that we've reached a point where pointing to the remaining annoyance points is mainly a way of not facing the real problems, which at this point are mainly external and have to do with the way our economy works, and are much more intractable than problems with the OS, with Wine and so on, which can be fixed by clever energetic coders.

For instance, just because sufficient marketing combined with product placement of preloaded Linux computers could push Linux adoption does not mean that is likely to happen. Desktop Linux has to be not just useful for people but a profit driver for some corporation before anyone will do such a thing.

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That's hilarious! Love the ambiguous title, too.

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That looks kind of cool. Might give that beta a try.

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See more in their new Medium post.

I dunno. If it was a good post or better yet, an awesome post I'd probably go read it. But if it's only Medium . . . :P

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Huh. If they make another one, they'll have to rename this to Siralim Penultimate.

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I hate marketing. But, that's the world we live in, and I do like strategy. So OK, in marketing terms the question is not "how to market Linux", it's "Who do you market Linux to?"
(OK, before I go any further here I'd like to note that all the problems TheRiddick and Beamboom point out are mostly real and the ones that involve Linux itself should certainly be fixed, as should many others they didn't have space to mention. But that doesn't make them right in their assessment. It just means there are some people you can't effectively market Linux to. In theory TheRiddick apparently should be one of those people, except apparently he does use Linux, so I'm not sure what that means)

Like, the market for desktop and/or laptop and/or tablet computers is basically almost everyone. But if you're trying to break in, you don't break in to "almost everyone", you divvy it up into different kinds of people, different kinds of use cases. So first of all, people whose main attribute is being hard core gamers is not who you market Linux to. But that is a minority of the market. TheRiddick's "people who know what VRR is" are a tiny minority of the market (I'm not one of them--or maybe I know and I just don't remember).
Look at Chromebooks. ChromeOS is fucking crippled. My wife has a Chromebook. The dang thing is incredibly limited; all the arguments people have been making about Linux not being marketable go triple for ChromeOS. It has basically no software, it basically can't play games at all, and it's weirder to get used to than any of the more user-friendly Linux distros. Google Docs is not serious and if you're used to saving your documents on your computer or your thumb drive it's bloody annoying because it really doesn't want to let you put your stuff anywhere except on Google's cloud. And yet Google has successfully marketed Chromebooks to a solid little niche, to whom they are fit for purpose.

I'm convinced that there are substantial market segments for whom Linux, depending on distro, is the best OS. Right now, as is. And I'm not talking about techies. So for instance,
--People who want to do relatively basic computing, but not as bare-bones as ChromeOS. A bit of this, a bit of that, light gaming, not doing corporate work at home so they're not that worried about the details of document exchange. So like, relatively typical users.
--People who don't want to muck around with finding and installing software, who'd like their computer to come ready to do most of what they need, out of the box, might appreciate a computer with Linux and all the open source software preloaded.
--People who are vaguely paranoid about the things computer users might want to be paranoid about, but don't want to get a friggin' degree to figure out what to do about it. You could easily do a distro that is, within reason, pretty unlikely to phone home but still pretty user friendly, ideally with a little GUI app that gave you a checklist of things to enable or disable both in the OS and browsers, with paragraph explanations--maybe tooltip or something--you could optionally display for each item.
--People who like having it their way. Techies aren't the only people who like customization. Burger King practically built their franchise on the notion of "What if I want my burger without a pickle?" even though I'm not sure they actually offered any more freedom to customize than anyone else.
--Old people who've been using computers for a long time. User friendly Linuxes are easy to use, and at this point can be made to run a lot of older Windows software better than Windows 10 will run it. Older people often end up with a lot of little programs they still want to use that aren't supported any more. So like my dad uses an old genealogy program that won't work on the latest Windows, and it annoys the hell out of him; he's hanging on to Windows 7 like grim death. Set up a distro so it could easily inhale a person's legacy stuff and run it without too much fiddling with Wine, and felt pretty old-Windows-ish and would be fairly long-maintenance, and you'd have a great OS for older moderate computer users.

Those segments add up to a lot more than 2%. And a lot of the kinds of problems TheRiddick talks about would solve themselves pretty fast if the percentage went up a bit.

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Quoting: TheRiddick

Quoting: bradgy

We're still small, we are a niche market and we're going to remain that way likely for some time.

What, if anything, do you think will move the needle in this regard?

My guess is we need the Linux desktop to work better, its still a bit chunky around the corners, only a couple DE's actually do UI scaling correctly, many have poor default settings which do nothing but frustrate users, some have functionality that is to hidden for the common user while others have so many UI options and configurations that its extremely easy to get confused over them.

On top of that, to get the best experience you often need to run the latest releases which for example in Ubuntu's case don't appear in the repository due to slow update cycles, so new users must LEARN howto obtain newer versions of things, keep in mind that on windows you just goto the website and download the exe, boom, under linux it requires all these repository commands and extensive searching, and then confusion over which commands are for which distro etc..

You see there are many reasons why the common folk are not flocking to Linux desktops as a alternative, and I haven't even mentioned performance and compatibility issues with games, inc VRR related problems (there are many).

Linux desktop for general use and gaming is getting allot better, but it has a hideous long way to go to come close to windows level functionality.
(it's ease of use is debatable, tho it doesn't force users into the cmd prompt all the time so that is a plus!)

Really, I don't find this. Maybe it's because I use Mint? (with Mate) I mean sure, ten, fifteen years ago maybe I used to be always waiting for the next release of stuff--software too, like I was always hoping that like if I could get the latest release of a word processor or whatever some key bug or missing feature would be fixed.
But now, not so much. Most of the software I ever use is pretty mature now; I just use the stuff from the repos via the software manager, never touch a command line, like, ever.
I know what Windows is like, I use it at work and at that, at work all the updates and getting the crap out of the way is mostly handled by the Systems staff so I don't need to deal with a lot of shit I'd have to deal with if I had my own computer running Windows. And OK, it's not terrible. But it's not as good as Mint with Mate. Linux has a couple of polish issues here and there that are annoying. But Windows has similar issues that are more annoying. For instance, on Mint when I plug in a USB, it puts an icon for it on my screen and pops up a file manager window with it. On Windows, all it does is pop up a message saying there's something wrong with my USB. To get at my files I need to open up some folder and then find it in the list of stuff at the side and switch to it. And I need to ignore that message, because not only is it a lie, but if I let Windows try to fix the USB it will sabotage it. The Windows file manager is in a few ways a bit clunkier to use--slightly more difficult navigation, can't do split window as far as I can tell (although it is easier to rename files). Windows in general often seems to pop up cryptic messages about arcane things which look like I ignore them at my peril, but actually I'd be in peril if I paid attention to them. It's annoying.
And I really like the Mint Software Manager and the Linux software updating compared to anything on Windows. And I like having more control of the toolbar/s; turns out the way I like it is having two, one at the bottom, one at the right. Menu and a couple applets and the windows list on the bottom, launchers on the vertical one at the side, with a shut-down button at the top corner. Other people like it various different ways for their own reasons. On Linux I can have that. On Windows, pretty sure not.
And both my Windows desktop at work and the Windows laptops we lend out at my library take bloody forever to boot up and log in.

I started using Linux for political reasons--I approve of Free Software. But I continue using it today because for some time now, for me it is overall more user friendly than Windows; going back and forth every day, I find Linux a better experience. Well, Linux Mint with Mate, anyway.

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Quoting: GustyGhost

Quoting: Liam DaweMarketing and more vendors having Linux installed on their systems. Currently, the Linux desktop has very little good marketing.

Being largely non-commercial, Linux desktop will unlikely ever have that kind of marketing. And I do not see that as a bad thing. The nature of it enforces a soft requirement that users have the wherewithal to be able to install and maintain their own systems. It keeps the Linux space filled with a healthy proportion of above-average-computer-literacy individuals.

I would love to see PC gamers adopt free operating systems as the "default" platform as much as anybody else here, but only if that does not mean doing so at the expense of quality of it's users.

Speaking as a not particularly computer-y guy, sod that. I find it a rather offensively elitist attitude. It's a techie version of Apple snobbery about wanting to have just artistic types and hipsters.

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